The Con-Text of Church Decoration in the Middle Ages

Session Organizer: Kirsten Ataoguz, Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne

The varieties of church decoration in the Middle Ages far exceed explanations offered by contemporary writers of their form and function. Scholars must look to the art itself - its placement, its form, and its content - to understand the role of images in spaces of communal worship. Questions of audience, access, and visibility complicate any such inquiry, but analysis of the texts read aloud in churches - sermons, readings, and prayers - provides an immediate and directly relevant context. The side-by-side analysis of sermons and images may reveal analogous rhetoric, intersecting subjects, and parallel purposes. The selection of readings in a lectionary and of images in a pictorial program may share emphases. The prayers in a sacramentary and the program of a church may reflect common concerns. Image and text may also diverge from one another to complicate our view of the coherency of medieval thought. This session invites paper proposals from scholars of text as well as scholars of images to explore the relationship between the recited word and images in, around, and moving through churches.

Please send your abstract, along with the paper proposal form (which you can find at www.wmich.edu/medieval/Assets/pdf/congress/PIF2012.pdf), to Kirsten Ataoguz at kirstenataoguzgmail.com, by September 15, 2011.